1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and systems for determining user interface usage, and in particular detecting and measuring the duration of activities or processes performed in one or more user interfaces.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional approaches to detecting an activity or process in a user interface rely on first describing and then recognizing a user workflow. For example, a workflow may consist of a series of steps a user performs. However, there are drawbacks to using a workflow to detect processes and activities. For example, there may be multiple ways to perform the same activity, which makes it difficult to capture all the different ways to perform the activity. There may be multiple applications where the user can perform the same activity, which makes it difficult to detect all but the simplest activities because the number of possible workflows becomes too large to describe. Likewise, in a desktop environment, users can multitask, effectively intertwining multiple workflows into a single sequence that must then be disambiguated to detect single activities.
As a result, a need arises for improved techniques for detecting and measuring the duration of activities or processes performed in one or more user interfaces.